The Most Difficult Things in Writing
Writing is a funny hobby, job, whatever you want to call it. While writing you need develop realistic characters, an intricate plot and tell an engrossing story. All the while you need to go around asking questions like “where would a child get a hold of meth” or “how many potatoes does it take to charge a cell phone” which gets people to look at you funny, and probably put you on a list somewhere. Those sound difficult, but those are actually the fun parts of writing. There are some parts of writing that aren’t so easy. In fact, they can be really difficult. Here are things that I know I have (or will have trouble with) * Beginning a fantasy story without telling the reader everything about your world that you’ve come up with in the past year entirely in the first chapter. * Realizing that like 75-90% of the stuff you came up for with your fantasy novel will never actually make it into the book. * Realizing that 99.99% of the time “effect” is a noun, and “affect” is a verb. * Writing the final chapter of the book you spent three years on without rushing it in the home stretch. * Not killing that villain that you really fucking hate like… right here and now. * Writing a sex scene, knowing that some day both of your parents will eventually read it. And then all of your other relatives will read it. And then future relatives will read it. * Creating a fictional society with a really broken/stupid/extreme ideology and hoping that no one ends up thinking you support that. * Writing characters that do things you find as heinous and describe them in intimate details. And then figuring out how to write them without overcompensating and making the audience think that you’re psychologically disturbed. * Killing off characters that you really, really like. * Making a fictional language. Like… that’s my least favorite part of world-building, entirely. * Not using the same really cool word over and over again. Seriously, if I’m aptly tempted or forgetful, I’ll end up using words like “glimmer” five times in a chapter. Every author has their favorite words. * Being succinct and telling a story that can be described in a paragraph while making it to 50,000 words. * The first paragraph of the novel. * The last paragraph of the novel. * Editing and revising that novel that you just finished and want to be done with because it took you like three years and you’ve got other ideas and only one life and… * Editing and revising that novel that you just finished editing and revising because the second draft wasn’t good enough, and you never want to deal with it again even more... * Sports, car chases, fights, most scenes that involve heavy action. “He punched the other guy. The other guy made a quick dodge and then he kicked and…” * Writing in active voice when you’ve got a melodramatic narrator who keeps dwelling on the past. * Writing in active voice instead of passive voice in general. * Coming up with names. Fuck coming up with names. * Writing about things in wintry environments because it’s nothing but cold and snow and pine trees. * Deciding on which totally awesome idea to write for your next novel because you’re definitely going to forget about the finer details about the other ones by the time you finish. * Making a manipulative bastard or a chess master lose without it being a total copout. * Not giving up 10,000 words in and thinking that everything you’ve done up to this point is completely stupid. * Not giving up 20,000 words in and thinking that the first 10k words were pretty good, but the next 10k were absolutely crap. * Not giving up 30,000 words in when you realizing that the plot probably won’t make another 20k words. * Making the theme obvious without bludgeoning the audience. * Ignoring the fact that you’ve written “said” about 50 times in the past hour because people don’t really care about the word “said.” * Wondering if you’ve used too many synonyms for the word “said” because that really bothers you. * Figuring out if this scene has too much dialogue or too little dialogue. I always feel like whenever there are five or more lines of dialogue in a row that I’ve written too much dialogue and it’s beginning to feel like a script. Then I feel the need to just throw in some paragraphs of description and it can get all disjointed. * Titles. Goddamnit, I’m worse than names when it comes to titles. I don’t think that I’ve ever made a title that I actually like. * Writing in present tense and not accidentally switching to past tense, because everything seems to be written in past tense and I learned how to write in the past tense. * Realizing that there's two "a's" in "accidentally" * Actually telling a story when you have a message you want to convey, and the story is about conveying that message. * Not feeling embarrassed that you’ve decided to write something silly, like fanfiction or a science fiction novel about squid people. * Not making lists like this when I should actually be writing. I’m sure there will be many other things that will be problems for me in the future, but these are some writing weaknesses that I have or have had. I think that we all have some things like this. You guys got any? Category:Miscellaneous